The HistoryAddict's Scribblings




I was a soldier in my youth, as were most of my male Southern contemporaries. Even after six years of fairly undistinguished service in the Army and Army National Guard, I never saw a day of conflict, never heard a shot fired in anger, and never suffered any of the other pains of war, but again like so many of my Southern brethren, this was the destiny I was bred for. My earliest memories are of playing with toy guns and plastic helmets, getting a new "Army uniform" every year on my birthday, and consuming 1940s and 50s era war movies like so many grains of popcorn. The house where I grew up, in quiet suburban Atlanta, turned out to be built on an old training ground used during both world wars, part of what was then called Camp Gordon. The trenches, bunkers and even some barbed wire barriers still remained in the thick woods, which provided a perfect setting to act out our military fantasies nearly every afternoon after school, rain or shine, cold or hot, just like we all imagined "real" battle would be like.

 

The American Civil War was still a living, breathing daily presence even in this 20th century suburban environment, and my friends and I would casually talk about our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the units and commanders they fought with, and this part of Atlanta being near some of the great battlefields around the city, we sometimes walked the very ground they fought and died upon. We all expected that every one of us, without need to mention it, would repeat the military service they performed, and that our fathers and uncles had done in the world wars, immediately after graduating from or dropping out of high school. The Vietnam War was a looming presence, some of us had brothers or cousins who had been there, and we all expected to end up in those same jungles one day. The fact that some of us might not return from those jungles, as our forebears had not all returned from their own elysian fields, never became a topic of conversation, other than in the form of humorous boyish harassment.

 

Being bred for war does not prepare one in all ways for a life of quiet civilian productivity, and in many ways sets up a sort of unstated yearning for the most destructive of all human endeavors - as if we could not be fully men without the searing forge of war on our souls. This is not just an intellectual curiosity, either, it is something that is central and core to the way this society shapes and views its men. John Elderedge in his book, Wild at Heart, talks about this masculine desire for adventure as not only an integral part of a man's creation, but one that gives him purpose and direction in life, "A man wants to be the hero to the beauty. Young men going off to war carry a photo of their sweetheart in their walletÉYou see, it's not just that a man needs a battle to fight, he needs someone to fight for." Elderedge also quotes the poet Ed Sissman commenting on what happens to a man that missed his chance for war:

 

            Men past forty

            Get up nights, Look out at city lights

            And wonder

            Where they made the wrong turn

            And why life is so long

 

This is precisely why war movies are often mockingly referred to as "guy movies," as the vast majority of men today in America, like me, have no direct knowledge of the experience of war, yet are drawn to it and sometimes consumed with curiosity about it. My own curiosity was to answer the question, how would I respond in battle, would I become one of the despised deserters, would I cower in fear in the bottom of my foxhole, or would I have been one of those to stand fast beside the colors while the enemy stormed in to kill us all?

 

This curiosity has shaped my professional life in no small way. I am a military historian by profession, trained to be an academic and teacher, accustomed to the cramped discomforts of archives and research libraries, health affected by too many hours of sitting and reading poorly microfilmed records and too little exposure to air and sunshine, yet driven to learn more and more by this insatiable curiosity. My particular obsession is with the American Civil War, as not only did I grow up in the midst of one of the great campaign areas, at least 24 of my relations fought for the Confederacy, four dying for the cause. One, Pvt. H.T. McKay, my father's grandfather, lived long enough to pass his stories of drill, march and battle down to him firsthand. His cousin, Pvt. J.H. McKay, was one of the cavalrymen who was escorting Jefferson Davis when he was captured at the end of the war (a fact which has opened more than a few doors in small-town museum collections!), and the rest were present in one or more of nearly every significant battle of both the Eastern and Western Theaters of the war.

 

All of this leads to the question I hope to answer in this book, what was it like to be a soldier in combat during the Civil War? What was it like to be a poorly trained, ill-equipped and un-uniformed militiaman in a state "army" trying to, literally, defend your own home? What was it like to be stuffed into a dank, dark, sweltering 3-foot diameter iron tube, turning a crank to escape an enemy howling after you, all while 30 feet below the surface of Charleston harbor? What was it like to be a Creek infantryman, slowly riding in to a Union post in the wilds of frontier Oklahoma, riding under the barest threadbare rags of what had been your proud battle flag, knowing you were among the very last Confederates to surrender? What was it like to be a Prussian-born corporal, barely able to speak English, caught in the midst of a vicious street battle in Fredericksburg?

 

Most important of all, what was it really like, on a personal level, to be a soldier during the Civil War? What did the uniforms feel like on hot summer days, what did the food taste like, what did you do to entertain yourself over those long months in camp, how did the rifle feel in your hands when slick with sweat and gun oil, what was it like to pull the ramrod and draw a bead on an incoming enemy line, and finally, like my own great-grandfather's experience, what was it like to be a 16-year old veteran infantryman, having the remains of your shattered leg cut off while lying atop a tavern table on a lonely mountain in Maryland?

 

In this book, we can explore on one level what the real "face of battle" was like for these men, and do so by looking through the lenses of 15 actual soldiers from that war. These men, by and large, have never had their stories told in print before, and with very good reason; there is very little in the way of records, official or otherwise, to be found in any known archive about any of them. We do know from battle reports, muster rolls, remaining unit photographs, artifacts in museum collections, family stories and a handful of letters and diaries that these men did exist and from other sources we can piece some of their war experiences together, but there is not nearly enough information on any of them to provide even the barest hint of a full biography.

 

So, why were these men chosen? Precisely because of this nearly anonymous status, primarily, and because the relative celebrity of better-known lives would interfere with the attempt to personalize the experience for the reader. To illustrate this idea, could you, dear reader, ever imagine your self as Robert E. Lee, atop Traveler, with Longstreet sitting on his horse at your side while attempting to decide whether or not to launch the assault on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg? Of course not, not only because Lee's life has already been studied and written about nearly to death, but also because Lee himself is still seen as nearly equal to the Almighty in some circles, and nearly as unknowable in most others. These lesser-known fighting men are equally worthy of both study and distinction, yet their very anonymity makes it is easier to relate to what they did and experienced on a more personal level.

 

War is the epitome of all possibly human cruelty and suffering, and as Sherman remarked long after his own war, it cannot be refined. We, or at least I, do not study military history in order to find great glory in the taking of some hill, some patch of ground, or raising one colored banner over another color banner's possessions. Instead I find the greatest of humanity, of man's love for his fellow man, in these, the most depraved of circumstances. It is almost a cliche, but still overwhelmingly true, that men in combat after the first few fights usually don't stick around to gain glory, or medals, or women, or other such possessions, but because they cannot abide the thought of abandoning their friends. "We fought for each other" is a common refrain throughout modern combat histories, from the small band of beaten up, freezing and almost ready to be discharged Continental regulars who followed George Washington in a high risk night amphibious assault against a garrison of some of the world's toughest soldiers - the German mercenaries at Trenton, to the equally small bands who still stood by their regimental colors at Appomattox Courthouse and Durham Station, to the small groups of paratroopers who stood together despite impossible odds at Normandy and Bastogne, to the shunned infantrymen and Marines who sweated and bled together in the jungles, rice paddies and mountains of Vietnam, only to come home to an even harsher and longer war.

 

Why these thoughts in a book about Civil War combatants? It is all connected, for if there is one thing that has always bound any army throughout history together, it is tradition and the formalized memory of unhappy times they went through together long ago. At this writing, we are engaged in the first major war of this new century, once again young men are being asked by their country to stand to the colors and do their duty. One of the very first large units sent into battle was the storied 101st Airborne Division, whose "Screaming Eagle" shoulder patch bears the image of Old Abe, the mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry, a Union army regiment that fought it's way through Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas. The Army's Special Forces and 75th Ranger Regiment each draw part of their heritage from John Hunt Morgan's Confederate Partisan Rangers, who raised hell far behind Union lines throughout the war, as well as other "special operations" forces like the Andrew's Raiders and the crews of the CSS H.L. Hunley, all of whom paved the way for the military's acceptance of such commando style operations.

 

I mention all this for these reasons, and more so very the most important consideration of all. Even though most of the men discussed or mentioned in this book are long-forgotten and unheralded by most, it is their sacrifices, honor and service that allowed the "great men" to have books, poems, and movies written about them, to have their images cast in bronze and stone, and to have their names recited in a droning manner by legions of schoolchildren over the past 140 years. Nothing particularly wrong with this, of course, but it is these men written about in these pages that are the most important of all, yet the least recalled, and it is the height of tragedy to leave them and the things they did to be forgotten. I do this, then, in remembrance of them.



©2006 John McKay. All rights reserved.





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